COVID-19 Lockdown: NAAC extends accreditation period for institutions

NEW DELHI: The National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) has given 15 days to one-month extension to institutions whose accreditation expired during the ongoing lockdown. The lockdown was enforced from March 25 and has been extended to May 3 as a measure against the coronavirus pandemic. Earlier, NAAC had cancelled all the scheduled peer team visits till April 30.

“This is a health emergency situation and nobody knows when the situation will normalise and higher education institutions would open up. We do not want to pressurise institutions in this problematic situation so peer review visits will take place once institutions would open, and the ones whose accreditation expires during this period they would get some time to apply for process,” said NAAC Director, S C Sharma.

NAAC is also utilising digital platforms to address quality concerns of higher education institutions (HEIs), and has constituted various academic committees to look into routine academic matters. He said that aseries of online meetings, webinars, programs concerning assessment and accreditation activities have already been held and many are in the pipeline in the coming days.

Earlier in March, it announced that as a social distancing measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19, all peer team visits of the institution scheduled between March 24 to April 30 were cancelled. The NAAC notice said: “Fresh dates of peer team visits to the concerned institutions will be communicated after 30th April 2020. All HEIs will be given an extension of time once the situation eases out. Without loss of generosity, all HEIs are requested not to be panicking. There will be no Peer Team Visits until April 2020.”

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